


Stopwatch

by virnnich



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Lecture, M/M, Physics, Sleepy Cuddles, The order of time, carlo rovelli, future protagonist, past neil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:13:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26343946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virnnich/pseuds/virnnich
Summary: I wish we could stop time.We were lying in bed, 9 am, mid september, in this deep and peaceful slumber. It was raining outside. The room turned into black and white. Everything outside was telling us to enjoy the dry and warm blanket with the heat radiated from us. Your head was snuggling on my left shoulder. If I can choose when to stop time, this would be the perfect moment.
Relationships: Neil & The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	Stopwatch

**Author's Note:**

> I just find metaphysics really romantic and I believe Neil thought the same.

I wish we could stop time.   
  


We were lying in bed, 9 am, mid September, in this deep and peaceful slumber. It was raining outside. The room turned into black and white. Everything outside was telling us to enjoy the dry and warm blanket with the heat radiated from us. Your head was snuggling on my left shoulder. If I can choose when to stop time, this would be the perfect moment.

We finally got a small break from our missions, just like a silent minute before a storm came. This place in Norfolk was one of our favourite safe houses. It was when we knew each other enough to be madly in love, but not enough to overcome the ignorance I’d been avoiding. I didn’t even know how I managed to hide it. I don’t think I did.

Neil finally woke up. He moved his head from my shoulder back to his pillow and said, “I wish this bed is the singularity, where time slows down it almost stops”. 

I just looked at him, appreciated the moment, breathed, held my breath, and forgot to reply (not that I knew how to answer him). Neil smiled, the same way he did when he wanted to crash the plane, “Do you feel like going backwards? So we don’t feel like time goes forwards.”

“What can we do?”

“Listen to a fairytale?” 

Right dear, people listen to fairy tales before bed, tiny people, not an adult like me.

I didn’t mind missing breakfast nor going to the beach in the rain just to listen to the sound of the waves anyway. I smiled back at him “As long as you read it forwards.”

Neil picked one of the books from his bedside table. It’s called The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. The cover was just beautiful, bronze lines connecting dots over a deep violet hardcover.

“Is that your kind of fairy tale?” Neil ran his hand over his hair, just like how I had seen it so many times I lost count. He was staring at me, in baby blue pajamas, with the most innocent look he could pull off. “I can guarantee it’s a glittering and beautiful story, but there was no ‘once upon a time’ in this story. In this book time doesn’t go in linear.”

“I think I have had enough of that.”

“No, you don’t” He replied with the exact same expression on the first day I met him and the exact same sentence. I held my breath for a solid 7 seconds. I suddenly remembered what lay ahead and what’d happened, happened. I didn’t want to let that time ruin the present, if present still meant a thing.

I just wanted to distract myself and hid my emotions that were about to pour out, so I grabbed the book and opened it randomly in the middle.

_Chapter 9: Time is ignorance_

_Do not ask_

_about the outcome of my days, or yours,_

_Leuconoe ––_

_it’s a secret, beyond us._

_And don’t attempt abstruse calculations._

If god exists, they probably want to warn me.

Neil took the book from my hands, and read it himself. I did not think I had the energy to stop him.

 _“There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to weep and a time to dance, a time to kill and a time to heal. A time to destroy and a time to build.”_ His voice was made to give the most romantic lecture but I would prefer not to enroll in his course.

“What is time? By your definition?” I asked. I just felt like I should have asked him in the _past_.

“According to Aristotle, time is nothing other than the measurement of change, but Newton said there is a time that passes even when nothing changes. Like, we have known each other for 7 years. That is quantifiable. That is measurement. But for Newton, without me, your time exists, and is independent from me.”

I thought of the time when he had existed and was quantifiable with the time I had spent with him.

“Einstein found they were both right. It turns out time is also relative to space, mass, the gravitational field and many other things. What I wish is this room is a black hole, having a gigantic mass and the gravity is enormous light could not get out. Imagine this room is an event horizon and this bed is a singularity, time would stop, or at least almost stop. We would be lying in bed on a gloomy day in Norfolk forever.”

He said it as if he knew what would happen in his future. I was sure I’d never given any spoilers, but I guessed my body language could not hide. I would like to stretch this moment, the time, to be as long as it could be. May the gravity hold us back to this infinite mass of bed and never let us go. Never let him go.

“I’m not a good student and I don’t really understand these brief definitions, but sure I do feel it. I do feel your time.”

“I feel the reality. I feel us.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please correct me if I got the metaphysics and its metaphor wrong. Don’t let Neil be disappointed in me.


End file.
